Jane (34 page)

“We will go tomorrow,” he said.

Then he drew me to him, and in that moment all but his sweet lips and fervent embrace was well and truly forgotten.

Student and Teacher

The journey back to Eden was longer and more difficult than the one we had made to the coast, as so much of the previous trip had been achieved by downriver rafting on the Ogowe tributary.

The shallow water and tangle of slippery roots in the mangrove swamp behind Zu-dak-lul made footing difficult and dangerous, and here mosquitoes in profusion swarmed us. I constantly feared losing the Claytons’ journal that I’d packed into a crude satchel of sailcloth I had stitched to the best of my abilities. Tarzan was least at ease in the swamp of all terrains, and once having crossed into the jungle he seemed to find relief in the overgrown paths and impenetrable canopy of foliage. He was comfortable and familiar with the dim light of the jungle floor, the thick, sodden carpet of decaying vegetation between his toes. I was less than comfortable with palm fronds slapping my face and thornbushes scratching my legs. And the snakes—they were everywhere slithering and hanging in the branches of trees. We stayed well clear of the army of red ants that moved in a long roiling column devouring and denuding everything unable to move from its path.

We stopped at night, resting in whatever crude nest Tarzan could quickly fashion of banana leaves, eating a simple meal of fruit and nuts before laying ourselves down on our bed to sleep. He lost no time teaching me the simplest skills of survival. How to see and how to listen and detect the scent of any creature that might do us harm or become a meal. I learned to use every sense to its finest degree. How to become invisible in the forest.

I had never realized how hard and ragged my breath was after exertion, or how difficult it was to stand so perfectly still that an animal thirty feet away was unaware of me.

A split bamboo cane could be used to collect water to drink. Beans were to be found in the most unlikely-looking pods. And raw bananas, though bitter, could always be found and would stave off hunger if nothing else was edible. Feeling my teeth gritty, I crafted a toothbrush of sorts from the fibers of a palm tree, an invention that Tarzan found very clever and began to employ himself.

Though my training excited me, I was increasingly eager to begin my study of the Mangani. I had with me the Claytons’ journal with only eighty empty pages, and all the fountain pens and nubs of pencils I’d found in the hut. I fretted about the limited space for so prodigious a documentation as well as running out of writing materials, but there was nothing to be done about it. I had better be careful with my words and keep the illustrations small. When ink ran out, perhaps a substitute could be made from blood or berrry juice. The notes could always be enlarged upon when I returned home. It concerned me that living things were not at all my area of expertise. I was neither a biologist nor an anthropologist. I studied
fossils,
for pity’s sake, at the very most the tissue of cadavers.

*   *   *

On our fourth day out, the raucous sound of an elephant’s trumpeting up ahead stopped us in our tracks. Visions of Ral Conrath’s butchery and my own guilty part in it made looking Tarzan in the eye all but impossible. I saw by his grim expression he’d been witness to the Mbele slaughter.

“Have you been angry with me about the elephants?” I said, coming around to face him.

He bore deeply into my eyes. “I know … why you shot the bull. He would have hurt your father and … the black-white tribe.” We had spoken very little of the Porter Expedition, but this was his name for the strange conglomerate of native people and
tar-zans.
“Why shoot the female?” he said. “She was down. There was no danger.”

“She was suffering, Tarzan.”

He cocked his head to indicate his ignorance of the word.

“The female had already been shot many times with a terrible weapon.”

“The one that made a great thunder in the jungle?”

“Yes.”

“I saw many … wounds in her side. There was much blood.”

“That is right. The wounds were causing her awful pain. When I went to her in the clearing, I saw the hurt in her eyes. Where I come from, if an animal is suffering and cannot be healed, we take its life quickly. We end its suffering.” I paused to compose myself. “I did not
wish
to kill the elephants
,
the male or the female. I’m very, very sorry.”

“Your father is dead, like mine?” he said a moment later.

The question took me by surprise. I felt my throat tighten with the answer. “Yes,” I whispered.

“Why did he die?”

A bum ticker,
I thought ruefully, though the news of my death on the mountain would certainly have been the shock needed to kill him. I placed a hand over my breast and patted it.

“His heart was sick.”

“Why did the bad man leave you to die on Sumbula?”

How could I possibly answer so complex a question? Would Tarzan understand how Ral had tricked Father and me into believing his promises and lies? I could hardly admit my earliest feelings for the man. And how to begin explaining the Belgian incursion into Africa? The genocide of ten million tribespeople, and King Leopold’s desire to cut a road through Paradise.

“The bad man’s name is Conrath,” I finally said.

“Conrath.” Tarzan spoke this with the same repugnance he reserved for the name Kerchak.

“Tonight when we lie down to sleep, I’ll tell you the story of how I came to your forest.”

His eyes softened and his mouth curled into a slow, lascivious smile. “And I will tell of the first time I saw you bathing in my pool.”

The first time he saw me naked,
I thought. I hadn’t been mistaken about a near presence that day in Eden. He had watched me. Perhaps grown aroused.

“Is that why you followed me up the mountain?”

He nodded, not at all ashamed of his decidedly lewd motives. I wondered at the outcome of our fates had Ral Conrath not left me to die on Sumbula’s peak. If Tarzan’s primal urges had not, of necessity, been supplanted by his softer, more protective instincts.

“Take me to see the elephants,” I begged.

“Tantor,”
he said. “They are
tantor.
”

*   *   *

We lay stretched across a broad limb above a clearing where they drank and bathed in a muddy pool. There was an old bull, monstrous in size, seven females, four of whom were mothers of
balu.
We watched them frolic, showering each other and twining their trunks together affectionately. But it was the
balu
sliding and flopping gracelessly in the slippery mud that held us rapt, and the sweet attention of the mothers who used their strong, sinuous trunks to help the young ones stand, only to watch indulgently as they fell again.

They craved bathing—splashing and swimming in clear deep pools and lolling about for whole afternoons in muddy ones, endlessly flapping their great ears to beat the mosquitoes from their eyes.

The largest of the females had recently birthed the youngest and smallest of the
balu.
This baby was the clumsiest, forever slipping with splayed legs in the mudholes. Once we watched as the tiny creature sank in a deep hole, its slopes so steep and slippery that none of the females could extract him from it. They had begun trumpeting in panic. With a deafening bellow, the trees parted and the bull came charging out of the bush. In a graceful sweep of his immense trunk, he encircled the body of the youngster and lifted him up, depositing him gently onto the muddy shore.

We slept that night and rose early. Tarzan led me to a deep, sandy-bottomed pool, and we slipped into it moments before we heard the low rumbling of
tantor
’s soundings, the snapping of twigs and branches that heralded their arrival.

Following Tarzan’s lead, I dove deep and swam underwater in the direction from which the elephants were coming. I felt the water disturbed as the huge beasts entered the pool. Now as we drew closer with our eyes open, we could see the great hulks of their bodies and the tangle of their paddling legs.

Taking my hand, Tarzan silently urged me to follow him closer to them, but I couldn’t. I was terrified at their immensity and their wildness, and I begged Tarzan not to go. I begged in vain. He took a long breath and submerged, breaking the surface surrounded by four of the females.

They stared with little fright but some curiosity at his head—all that protruded from the water, bobbing on the surface. I could see him smiling as the trunk of one touched him delicately on the back of his head. They were curious. Carefully, he brought his hands above the surface and reached out to the female before him with fingers spread. Eyes fixed on him, she wrapped her massive trunk around his arm.

They all took turns touching him, finally realizing there was more to him below the water’s surface. I heard him laugh as they explored his body. But when the giant bull began paddling his way, a bolt of real fear tore through me. Would the male be as curious as the females, or would he regard this stranger as an intruder, and with a glancing blow to Tarzan’s head with his trunk, or an upward thrust of a sharp tusk, kill him?

It seemed to my untrained eye that the bull was indeed wary. He swam close, then the long, thick trunk snaked below the surface. I had rarely seen alarm in Tarzan’s expression, but it was now apparent that the male had wrapped his trunk clear around Tarzan’s torso. In the next instant the elephant dragged Tarzan beneath the surface.

I fought panic as more than a minute ticked by with my lover fully submerged. He had barely had time to suck in a full breath. Two minutes, and more … I was poised to create a disturbance, shouting and flailing about, when suddenly the bull’s grasp loosened and Tarzan exploded out of the water astride the back of a baby! He gasped a breath and one of the females trumpeted loudly. With this, the bull turned and paddled away, as though to leave this strange white, fuzzy-headed
balu
to the females.

Soon after, I, too, was welcomed into the company of the herd. Once my fear had sufficiently subsided, we spent the morning in joyful communion with the elephants, bathing and playing. We’d dive deep and encircle their thick legs with our arms. Once I slid beneath a female and caressed her leather belly, examining the two teats between her forelegs. We bobbed near their heads and splashed water on their ears, closely observing these magnificent appendages.

The air grew ever thicker and hotter, the swarms of insects unbearable. Late in the afternoon the herd took refuge in a shallow watering hole and found relief from the flying pests in the cool brown-black mud at its edges. Hand in hand, we followed them gingerly in. Standing waist-deep in the pool, I understood why
tantor
sought these baths. No mosquitoes swarmed us. No sand flies bit us. Mud cooled the skin. We went back to the shore and rolled in it, covering ourselves—hair, face, limbs, and torso—in the stuff, and laid ourselves out in the sun, baking. Tarzan dove into the pool and wallowed amid the herd, cooling himself. One by one, the females and
balu
allowed him to mount their slippery backs. Tarzan’s laughter echoed across the water as he slid and splashed down, and climbed up again, only to careen back into the mud for the sheer joy of it.

“Jane!” he cried, beckoning to me broadly. I was all at once observing myself, sitting mud covered on that slippery shore, invited by a near-naked English lord into a pool of elephants. I shook my head in disbelieving wonder … and joined him.

Return to Eden

The homecoming to Tarzan’s fig tree was sweeter than I ever had imagined it would be. There was a great and raucous welcome from Mr. Grey, who, upon our arrival, flew rather than walked down to the nest and began shouting out the whole of his vocabulary as he paced back and forth on a branch above our heads. “Tarzan!” the crimson-tailed parrot cried. “Tarzan! Tarzan, piggy, piggy, Jane.”

The bird was, in fact, so happy to see his old friend that he jumped down on Tarzan’s head. His needlelike claws became stuck in the long hair and were soon tangled. We both laughed at his clumsy extraction from this “bird’s nest.”